VA Success Spotlight: Meet Kathy

Meet Kathy Ambrosic.

Kathy works from her home on Hilton Head, South Carolina, alongside her two dogs, who she calls her assistants. She doesn't have a website and hasn't needed one. Everything about her business runs through her LinkedIn profile. 

Not long ago her son left for the airport and called her half an hour later in a panic. He had forgotten his passport. Kathy stopped what she was doing, picked it up, and drove it to him. 

"If I was at a full-time job, I would not have been able to do that," she told me. That's the thing I want you to remember while you read the rest of her story. Kathy built a business that fills full-time hours and still lets her be the person who can drop everything to be there for her family. 

Kathy has 20 years of administrative experience. She knew how to do the work long before she found me. That wasn't the problem. 

The problem was what she was getting paid for it. For years she worked through low-paying Virtual Assistant agencies at $20 an hour. The agency set the rate, the agency sent the clients, and Kathy did the work. Her family didn't take it seriously. 

There was one more thing wearing on her. When Kathy went out networking and said "I'm a Virtual Assistant," she kept getting the same reply. I can get somebody overseas for four dollars an hour. Why would I pay you? 

It got to her. For a while she stopped wanting to say the words at all. 

I will tell you what I told Kathy. The person who says that was never going to hire you. He is not your client, and you lose nothing when he walks away. Kathy's own answer to him now is the right one: "I'm not a good fit for everyone." 

Her actual clients tell a different story. One client, a mortgage broker, had been through a string of Virtual Assistants, each with about a year of experience, and she was explaining her business from scratch every time one of them moved on. What she told Kathy was that she was done training people with a year of experience. She wanted someone who had done this for 20 years and would not need anything explained twice. 

That client is still with her, in a real estate market that isn’t doing anyone any favors right now. She is not the exception. Every client Kathy has found on her own has stayed more than two years, because what they have with her is a working relationship they trust. 

I want you to sit with that, because so many of you have told me you are worried about being too far along in life for this. The years Kathy has spent working are not a problem she has to apologize for. They are the reason that client hired her, and the reason she stays. 

The business owners who hire Kathy are not shopping for the cheapest option. They are shopping for someone who knows what she's doing. 

When Kathy joined VA School in February 2024, we didn't spend our time on skills. We spent it on pricing, and pricing is only partly math. The other part is becoming the kind of person who says her number out loud and doesn't flinch. 

She went from $20 an hour to $55. That alone changed how her family talked about her business. 

She didn't stop there. Today her new clients come on at $75. When I asked her how that felt, she said, "It's my comfort zone. It never used to be, but now it is." 

I asked what shifted. Two things, she said. The quality of the clients she attracts now, and the experience she carries into every new one. "Every single one of them brings something new to the table that I can utilize for my next client." Twenty years of that is worth something, and Kathy finally charges like it is. 

Here is what Kathy's business looks like today. She works with eight clients. Two are Medicare insurance agents whose work runs hard for a couple of months every fall. Most of her clients have been with her at least two years. 

She works full-time, by choice, and she has designed the day around what she wants. She doesn't start client work before 9:30 or 10. She takes two hours in the middle of the day to go to the gym with her son. Then she works until 5 or 5:30 because she likes finishing what she started. 

Her rates go up every year on the anniversary of the day she started. And she is so booked that she is not taking new clients until December. 

The part Kathy talks about most is not the money. It is the relationships. "We talk, we laugh. We enjoy each other. We respect each other's time." Her clients know she has other clients, and they say so. That is very different from a job. 

I want to be honest about the slow part, because there is always a slow part. Kathy didn't raise every client to her new rate in one afternoon. She is doing it one client at a time, one year at a time, and a couple of her longest relationships are still catching up to where she wants everyone to be. She also had to let clients go. "When they don't work out, it's very stressful," she said. The group she has now is the group she chose. 

If you have 20 years of experience and you are being paid like you have two, Kathy is your proof that the gap is not your skills. It is the number you are willing to say, and the clients you are willing to walk away from. 

"I'm not a good fit for everyone." Says it all. Go find the ones you are.